


Two Roads Diverging

by It_MightBe_Love



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 14:45:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He watches the people around him unravel like poorly spooled twine, watches the frayed edges of people flicker to life under the lamplight flame of trauma, and terror, and anger, and he wonders if he should learn to tell Stiles no more often.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Roads Diverging

**Author's Note:**

> I made the mistake of going through the teen wolf tag and I realized that there isn't enough Scott McCall centric fic in the world.

Scott isn’t dumb. He knows he’s sometimes a little naive but for the most part he’s just as smart as any other sixteen year old. It isn’t actually his fault his best friend is of the ‘read and absorb everything up to and including often totally random and useless information’.

But Scott also figures that Stiles’ coping mechanisms aren’t that great, and if Scott playing down his own intelligence means Stiles doesn’t always feel like the sidekick then that’s actually something Scott’s pretty okay with.

It backfires of course, after the woods and the dead body and everything else that happens. Bodies start piling up around Scott and he isn’t sure what to make of it or how to deal with it and Scott? Scott is pretty damn sure he deserves a fucking medal for managing to not lose his mind completely and go zombie apocalypse on someone, there is only so much shit a sixteen year old can cope with and lizardmen, magic, crazed resurrected Uncles and the possibility of entire packs of slavering Alphas? Do not typically make that list.

Scott spends a lot of time on the tender edges of control, his first girlfriend had a breakdown and tried to kill basically all of the things, his mother found out he was a furry creature of the night, and there’s a distinct possibility he was partially responsible for the kidnapping and subsequent beating of his best friend, (he isn’t going into the fiasco that was the police station because the less said about that bag of guilt the better).

These are all things that are wildly out of Scott’s control, and it isn’t like a handbook or handy-dandy how to guide for the recently bitten exists. 

He watches the people around him unravel like poorly spooled twine, watches the frayed edges of people flicker to life under the lamplight flame of trauma, and terror, and anger, and he wonders if he should learn to tell Stiles no more often. (Or at all, because Scott is pretty bad at telling Stiles no, but theirs is a friendship made up of poor decision making at one in the morning so) - he’s digressed a lot from his point.

He only ever regrets it when someone says something about it, he isn’t focused enough in school, Finstock or Harris, or Mrs. McCready in Honors English isn’t satisfied with his latest paper. Scott isn’t like Stiles who can read something and make connections. Scott isn’t stupid, he isn’t slow, he didn’t have any real great traumas to his childhood, abusive father notwithstanding. Mostly, he likes to think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with him. He grew up with his mom, a shitty dad and monthly visits to his abuela down in Santa Monica.

He just… Scott is the more pragmatic of the twosome that is he and Stiles. Stiles is not always firmly tethered to reality, something Scott remembers Mrs. Stilinski dealing with as well (and he doesn’t remember much about Stiles’ mom. Her cookies and the lavender she always planted at the gate, “for good luck Scott, now run on inside I have some anemone to plant”).

Scott and Stiles would spend their summers in the Stilinski garden with Mrs. Stilinski teaching them about plants and making them lemonade and making sure they didn’t climb the Ash tree in the backyard. It’s branches were thick with age and Mrs. Stilinski told them stories about it.

Scott doesn’t remember most of them, he knows Stiles does.

Scott’s life is split into two diverging paths, like that Robert Frost poem about a yellowed wood and two roads to be traveled. On the one, Scott’s life is wrapped up in being Stiles’ friend. It’s bruised knees and secrets shared at three am, and the other is this new life. Blood slick and terrifying even as it’s exciting and all the things that aren’t connected to Stiles anymore.

If he could, Scott thinks he would probably go back and change it. Tell Stiles no, or maybe go out to the Sheriff’s car with him and deal with being grounded. But then he starts thinking about the possibility of someone else getting hurt.

The Sheriff maybe? Or one of the deputies, or another hiker. (Scott always gets hung up on the fact that the woman in the woods was Derek’s sister, and Scott doesn’t know a whole lot about what happened but he knows that a person doesn’t turn into such a raging douchebag if they aren’t carrying around a metric fuckton of baggage. He’d be more sympathetic but Derek is so arrogantly sure of himself, even when people are getting hurt that it just… rubs Scott the wrong way) - mostly though Scott doesn’t think he’d do anything differently, because he’s notoriously bad at telling Stiles no.

And really? This whole thing has kind of brought him closer to the idea of adulthood than he thinks he would have gotten otherwise.


End file.
